1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a stimulus-responsive gel material.
2. Related Art
At present, as a method for obtaining in vivo biological information, a biochemical test in which the composition of the blood obtained by blood collection is generally performed. This test is mostly performed in medical institutions.
Above all, a blood glucose sensor has been widely used in diabetic patients, and also a simple lactic acid sensor is getting widely used in athletes.
However, both are test methods involving blood collection using an invasive technique.
On the other hand, as a method using a non-invasive technique, a sensor targeting a component of sweat has been studied (see, for example, Wearable Technology for Bio-Chemical Analysis of Body Fluids During Exercise 30th Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Aug. 20-24, 2008, and Novel lactate and pH biosensor for skin and sweat analysis based on single walled carbon nanotubes/Sensors and Actuators B 117 (2006) 308-313).
However, such a method employs an electrode method using a dye or an enzyme and therefore has the following problems: a processing section and a display section for displaying data measured by an electrode are needed; a power source (a battery) for the electrode, the processing section, and the display section is needed; etc., and also has other problems that the structure is complicated and also the weight is large.
Further, the enzyme is generally expensive and is susceptible to temperature, humidity, etc., and therefore hardly exhibits stable properties, and also has a problem that the reliability of quantitative performance is low.
In addition, the enzyme greatly varies in quality among production lots or depending on manufacturers. Further, its properties change greatly over time, and therefore, it is necessary to perform calibration using a standard solution having a known concentration before use.